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The ghost story as a form has allowed women writers special kinds of freedom, not merely to include the fantastic and the supernatural, but also to offer critiques of male power and sexuality which are often more radical than those in more realist genres. Despite this, critical accounts of the Female Gothic have largely focused on the 'Gothic novel', and have been less inclined to engage with shorter fiction and the ghost story in particular.1 The Female Gothic is perhaps par excellence the mode within which women writers have been able to explore deep-rooted female fears about women's powerlessness and imprisonment within patriarchy, and the dereliction (to borrow Luce Irigaray's term) which is the result of their exclusion or abandonment outside the symbolic order.2 This state of dereliction renders women ghost-like: they are 'nowhere ... never in touch with each other, lost in the air like ghosts.'3
Such anxieties are also given expression in women's ghost stories but the tendency has been to regard the ghost story as a separate genre. Although it has its roots in the Gothic tradition and frequently uses Gothic motifs and settings, it is in structure and content, R. A. Gilbert contends, 'a very different genre' because it is 'super natural... it is truly the dead who return, and there is no place for rational explanation or artifice.'4 If'the Gothic' is detached from the 'Gothic novel', however, and regarded as a mode of writing rather than a genre then it becomes flexible enough to encompass the ghost story.
The lack of critical attention to women's ghost stories is also to do with a wider neglect of the short story, within which the ghost story (associated with anthologies or magazines and other ephemeral types of publication) has been doubly marginalised.5 Moreover, since, as Richard Dalby notes, ninety per cent of the stories in traditional ghost story anthologies tended to be by men, critical accounts of the ghost story have reflected this by focusing on the 'masters [sic] of the uncanny'.6
More recent anthologies of ghost stories by women have revealed that women have also excelled in this form, among them Elizabeth Gaskell, May Sinclair, and Elizabeth Bowen.7 These are, of course, all writers who are better known as novelists and who...